Unidentified Marine Creature, even
The Australian Museum can't tell me what it is!

Friday, November 10, 2006

Unidentified Marine Creature!

We decided to go fishing,and try out our recently acquired boat.My husband, son and I were fishing atBallina NSW, on the Richmond River.It was around the change of tide,I had my rod in the rod holder,when suddenly the line took off,the rod bent over and I nearly fell overtrying to get to it before the rod went in!.

I grabbed the rod, hooked it up and startedto reel her in!About half an hour later, after pulling the boat around a bit,I finally got whatever it was up tothe surface and realised that it had gotten caught up in our anchor rope,Damn!.

My husband grabbed the cameraand started taking pictures of what I caught,we haven't seen anything like it before!.At first we thought it was some kind of Ray,but it had no tail, instead it had what looked like the frontof a Manter Ray?and the head was different to a Ray.Unfortunately we didn't get it in the boat to have a really good look at it, and had to cut the line because of theAnchor rope.

6 comments:

I sent the picture to the Australian Museum for identification and here is there reply...

Dear LouiseI showed your photo to our Ichthyology department and it has got them baffled!The closest fish they could suggest is an eagle ray although the colouring is not right and some parts of the ray’s body seem to be damaged.Ichthyology suggested you look at our website, particularly these links: http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/anarinari.htm and http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/maustralis.htm (see lower image).Since you saw the fish yourself you may recognize the features in some of our online photos.